Moving 427 plugins to a new compiler is a huge task.
From Codewarrior 8 and Visual Studio 2005, we moved all plugin parts to compile with Visual Studio 2008.

Some DLLs are smaller, some are bigger. But in general I think the code from Visual Studio is faster than the code produced by Codewarrior which is at least 7 years older. Good news is also that we can now easier use some Windows technologies, especially COM objects.

Also I wrote code to identify stuff we do not need to include in a plugin, so I can strip those files. Especially as a smart linker is not always smart on creating small libraries.

Be sure to test your app with new plugins once we upload the first 11.3 prerelease. Some things may have changed. Especially we now use Unicode in all Windows plugins for texts.

PS: We use VIsual Studio 2008 instead of Visual Studio 2010 because the earlier one supports Windows 2000. And as long as we are not forced by Microsoft to move to a newer version, we can continue to support Windows 2000 and newer.
17 08 11 - 13:16